LETTER: Roadmap to Apartheid should be widely broadcast

The high court and equality court in the Western Cape have jointly ordered the Labia cinema in Cape Town to screen the film Roadmap to Apartheid within 60 days. The film, made in 2011 by an Israeli and a South African, juxtaposes “apartheid” in Israel/Palestine with apartheid in SA. 

The Labia contracted with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), not once but twice, to show the film. The Labia then buckled to Zionist pressures and reneged on its contractual commitments. As evidenced in the film’s trailer on YouTube, the parallels between the two regimes and human rights abuses are glaring.

The SA Human Rights Commission ordered the Labia to show the film in 2015 but the Labia arrogantly refused to comply — hence the protracted litigation by the Labia against the SA Human Rights Commission, Right2Know Campaign and PSC, which the Zionist lobby has now lost decisively.

Without a shred of evidence, your readers are repeatedly blitzed by Zionist hasbara correspondents that organisations such as SA Jews for a Free Palestine, the PSC and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign are irredeemably and viciously anti-Semitic.

Within “Israel proper” more than 50 laws discriminate against Palestinian Israeli citizens on the basis of citizenship, land and language. Reminiscent of the Group Areas Act, more than 90% of the land is reserved for Jewish occupation only. Such humiliations during apartheid SA were referred to as “petty apartheid”. 

Beyond the Green Line, the puppet Palestinean Authority is a “grand apartheid” bantustan with even less autonomy than the bantustans of apartheid SA.

The blatant objective of Zionism since the 1917 Balfour Declaration has been to steal Palestinian land and water, and thus to make life so impossible that Palestinians would “voluntarily” emigrate. That objective was no more realistic than apartheid in SA, which inevitably collapsed.

In his recent letter, Allan Wolman falsely claims that a meek and docile Palestine will benefit all Palestinians (“Change anti-Israel policy”, March 25). He repeats the lie that the objective of the BDS campaign is to butcher Israelis or drive them into the sea. The reality is that the “two state solution” is a non-starter, and that one democratic and secular state from the “river to the sea” will follow the equally inevitable collapse of Zionist apartheid.

If apartheid in SA was unacceptable to the international community back in 1977 when the UN Security Council rightly determined that it constituted a threat to international peace and security, why should it be imposed on Palestinians in 2021?

The International Criminal Court has at last summoned the courage to defy the US and Israeli governments. Similarly, the Western Cape judgment has implications far beyond confirming our constitutional rights in support of freedom of expression in SA.

Roadmap to Apartheid should now be shown throughout SA and globally, including on television, and thus begin to roll back spineless media and political collusion with Israeli war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity in Palestine. 

Given the uproar over Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng’s ill-considered remarks about Israel, hopefully the Labia and Zionist lobby will now finally obey the court judgment.

Terry Crawford-Browne
World Beyond War SA

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